Monday, 30 January 2017

A KINGDOM OF THE MAD ON THE MOONS BLACK SIDE

The Dark Side of the Moon is populated by, and composed
of, the dreams of those who sleep in dungeons. Anyone dreaming in a dungeon
dreams of this place and cannot leave it in their dream. Which makes dungeons a
doubly bad place to be.

This place is lit only by starlight and stolen mists, but
it is also an area of this world, a land which grows more powerful and who's
borders interpose with ours as shadow moves across the dial of the moon like
the lateral blinking of a lizards eye.

The vision-people of the moons black side are
moon-dragooned and serve as churls in the Fractal Baronies of the Unseelie
Chivalry, knights who kneel to Barons bound in loyalty to the Court of the
Sleeping King.

The Sleeping King dreams his fortress and his court and
the hypnagogic dreamscape of his lands and if he wakes all will disappear and
chaos will snap the scales and break the balance of the political moon,
bringing disaster to the star-lit sands. Therefore he is lullabied by an
endless supply of hollow-eyed holocaust-bards snatched from their homes and
stolen from their lands by the soft-shoed Silent Knights whose cloaks are
stitched from the skins of embryonic mice. Rows and rows are carted to the
Kings court on the dark side of the moon, chained and forced to pipe without rhythm,
tone or tune until the all go mad and die, then the bard-corpse is detached and
dragged away only for the bard to be replaced.

But this is not the only palace in this land, and not the
only lord.

There is the Court of the Moon, rumoured to be ruled by a
masked Selenian Queen, and the Knights of the Moon ensure a constant supply of
new dreamers and new lands by venturing out into the waking world and lending
their services as bounty hunters, cops and prison guards.

Anyone dreaming in any dungeon, anywhere in the world,
lends their strength to the Kingdom of the Mad and so it serves those Knights
that as many people as possible should be imprisoned for as long as possible as
deep as they can possibly be.

They care nothing for innocence or guilt, only
imprisonment, and there are many in the world who share their view, and are
keen to call upon their blades of smoking glass and their moon-bronze chains.

Wherever the dungeon dreamers are, erupt blocks of Piranesi-buildingforms,
impossible labyrinths of black stone, impossible archways and infinite rooms.
These are the result of the dreams of the long-term dungeon-doomed, and the
deeper and madder their imprisonment is in our world, the more magnificent the
palaces they build in theirs.

And there is the Court of the Grail. The Sacred Bowl
filled with the ever-replenishing black spit of God, hurled out as he shook his
many-angled prison somewhere in the cosmos-core, beyond the reach of reason or
measurement, hopefully never to escape.

The Holy Sputum breathes out the Verdant Land. Even
without sunlight or warmth, the monstrous life-giving power of the black spit is so intense that all
over the dark side of the moon, trees and plants of primitive and eldritch kind
boil up out of the lifeless white sand, black grass grows and nodding
vein-blood-purple orchids burst their sacks.

by Beth Moon

So due to these three horrors, the mad visions of the
Sleeping King, the nightmare memories of the dungeon-churls and the awful
verdance of the black gods spit, life, and economy come to the moons blind hemisphere.

THE KNIGHTS OF THE MOONS BLACK SIDE

The preferred mount is a horse/goat hybrid with enormous
polycerate horns, the eyes and legs and hooves of a goat and the body and speed
of a slender Arabian steed. They can climb anything, perch anywhere and can
chase escaping dreamers by leaping from branch to branch through the forest
canopy, and by dancing from arch to arch in the Piranesi-dungeons.

The hearts of these Knights are so cold that they can
freeze the water of an ocean as their horned horses hooves press against its
waves, they can sweep out of the sea on frozen tides clad in rosepetal mail
held together by thorns, or armoured in mantis wings pinned by the biting heads of ants,
holding shields of glass with porcelain swords.

Amongst their orders are Mad Knights, men who were good
knights and went mad, now believing impossible things, heroes who forgot
themselves or those who were never knights at all but simply believe they are,
driving only by the power of their delusion, Elvish Knights from the Otherworld,
spirits of Autumn and Winter who hate mankind and mans imaginings, masked
Knights of Misrule who’s king rules hidden from an endless carnival of death,
Grail Knights, brave and honourable men who serve and protect the spit of god
that brings life to this cold land, who’s eyes see only dying worlds and
cracked realities, and Goblin Knights, Goblins who have gone completely mad and
sworn themselves to tell the truth and do only good, and who have been forced
from Goblin lands, cloaked in clanking tin armour, mounted on pigs and told
never to come back.

Can’t be killed by any royal authority or command.ie.
if a king/queen says to someone “go and take out this deadly knight in my
forests” that command can never be fulfilled.

Allow a king or queen to escape your sight/swear
loyalty to any feudal hierarchy/be loyal (could even mean keeping a coin with
a king or queens head on it, rule revealed by Knight leaving certain kinds of
treasure behind)/obey an order.

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

‘They've knocked it out of the park. Hit it for six. Got it in an arm bar in the first round. Pick your sport, pick your metaphor, doesn’t matter: the point is clear – so soon after _Fire on the Velvet Horizon_, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess prove once again that something as unlikely as an RPG supplement can be art, of the most impressive kind. An amazing work.’ - China Mieville

FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

"Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015." - China Mieville" Maybe my favourite thing we've made. If you like Scraps work click the pic.